Portal:OpenGL Shading Language/Vertex Shader

The Vertex Shader is the programmable Shader stage in the rendering pipeline that handles the processing of individual vertices. Vertex shaders are fed Vertex Attribute data, as specified from a vertex array object by a drawing command. A vertex shader receives a single vertex from the vertex stream and generates a single vertex to the output vertex stream. There must be a 1:1 mapping from input vertices to output vertices.

Vertex shaders typically perform transformations to post-projection space, for consumption by the Vertex Post-Processing stage. They can also be used to do per-vertex lighting, or to perform setup work for later Vertex Processing shader stages.